Lightweight DevOps Host with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Not that I haven't been coding most of these days, but it just hasn't been fun, or sexy, or something to share. NO ONE WANTS TO READ ABOUT A DMARC MICROSERVICE, TRUST ME I'VE TRIED.

Anywho, here I am today in a new series that should hopefully be good for my own documentation as well. I'm in the process of deploying a new educational platform and it's all containerized, based on microservices deployed into a Kubernetes cluster, with sprinkles on top, and blah blah.

Thing is, I'm building this out in my home lab to avoid spending an extra hundred dollars in the cloud. So if you've got some hardware and time and want to do the same, I'll take you from Zero to Hero with this whole DevOps thing.

The Metal

So you can probably run this on anything really, but I'm going to start with a dedicated host and turn it into a container and virtualisation host. It's a simple Dell R620 with never enough Cores or RAM. The host sits on my internal network behind a pfSense router. It's got a static IP of 192.168.42.10 and we'll give it a hostname of thebus.kemo.labs.

Note that kemo.labs is not a valid TLD - that's ok. I have that domain resolved and routed via my pfSense router, you could do the same with DNSMASQ or BIND.

RHEL, RHEL, RHEL, we meet again

So this time I decided against going with Proxmox for the container/VM host to get closer to what my intended production environment will be like, which will be a Kubernetes/OpenShift cluster running CentOS/Red Hat Universal Basic Image (UBI) containers.

So some might want to just grab CentOS, which of course would work, but why not get your own free copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux? How does one procure one of these free copies? Why, wouldn't you like to know...

Ok, so simply enough, one just needs to register with the Red Hat Developers site, and grab your very own yearly Red Hat Developer Suite subscription. It expires yearly, but it's still just a free renewal and gives you access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Middleware offerings, and more.

So grab your subscription, download the ISO (I'll be using RHEL 7), and get it installed - so far that's the easy part.

Basic Provisioning

Now that we've got our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) host set up, you're staring at the log in terminal, jumped into your privileged user, and are now at a shell. Let's bless this mess a scootch...